Back in 1985, I was a young programmer at Apple who wound up spending time in Japan, helping Apple evaluate options for supporting Japanese on the Mac.

This nascent project became the focus for Apple’s new Pacific division, and a manager was dutifully assigned. A former sales guy named Dave Kleinberg. Great. Just what I always wanted.

And yes, there were some early impedance miss-matches, but by the end of the project he’d earned my respect. There were countless details outside the scope of just “gettin’ er done” (the coding bit that I cared about), and Dave sweated the details. We wound up shipping KanjiTalk 1.0 in May of 1986, and this wound up being the foundation for Apple’s long term success in the Japanese market.

As a side benefit, Dave gave all team members the best project tchotchke ever – the KanjiTalk Monolith:

Why the post today? A member of the KanjiTalk team just sent me the link to Dave’s obituary.

Dead at age 53 from lung cancer. We’d seen him a year ago at the 25th anniversary get-together, and he’d seemed fine. I wish I’d told him then what I just wrote now.

While our EuroVan continues to provide for a local mechanic’s retirement fund, I found this article on “Tuners” included a much faster version of what we’re (hopefully) driving the Grand Canyon during spring break.

The section on this vehicle from the article I linked to above says it all…

Winning first prize in the “You’ve got to be kidding me!” category was TH Auto­mobile’s TH2 RS. What’s wacky about it? Well, what started life as a pedestrian Volkswagen T5 van has been made into The World’s Fastest Brick.

First, TH Automobile swapped the engine from the front to the rear. But instead of a VW unit, TH dropped in a Porsche twin-turbo flat-6 breathed on by 9ff to produce 800 bhp. The rear axle and 6-speed manual transmission come straight from Porsche, as do the brakes.

The interior was also completely remodeled, the driver’s position switched to a central location, along with four carbon-fiber racing buckets for passengers. To handle the TH2 RS’s aero-defying speed of 193.1 mph (breaking the previous van record of 169.6 mph, set by a Claer-tuned T4 VW van), H&R provided an air suspension system that adjusts the ride height among three different levels depending on speed. TH claims the van can hit 62 mph in just 4.5 sec. A customer version would cost somewhere north of $225,000.

At almost 200MPH, that would get us to the South Rim in about, let’s see, 4 hours. Though we’d have to remove all of the camping accessories, move the engine from the front to the back, pay $225K, etc., etc., etc. But the look on driver’s faces as we sucked their doors off might make it all worth while.

We adopted Emmett from AnimalSave back in October 2005, and he’s been a great member of the Krugler pack. He seems to be a mix of sighthound and Labrador – in other words, he’s a mutt.

But one day, while Jenna and I were speculating about what kind of sighthound would give him his deep chest and curled tail, I did a search on “greyhound labrador mix”, and found out that we’d been wrong all these years.

He’s not a mutt, he’s a lurcher!

What’s a lurcher? Well, according to Wikipedia (source of all truth and goodness) a lurcher is:

After 10 years of on-and-off discussion, we finally took the plunge and bought a 1997 EuroVan Camper – or 97EVC for members of the club.

EuroVan Camper at Westport

Being able to pull in, pop the top, and kick back was huge.

Though we’re still working out the kinks in our travel setup and procedures – as a fellow EVCer said, it’s like living in a sailboat. You have to plan things a few moves in advance, so you don’t wind with the bed extended and the (blocked) cabinet containing your toothbrush.

And thank goodness for the EVC Yahoo group – without their help, I would have been totally stuck.

We’ve got a typical list of things to fix, buy, and figure out before the next big trip:

The dreaded Norcold refrigerator stopped working on propane. And the burner on light fell out (again).

Cruise control stopped working.

There’s a small coolant leak.

The driver’s side windshield wiper fluid doesn’t squirt.

There’s a new crack in the windshield.

The headlight low beams are way too low.

The rear (hatch) door sometimes doesn’t unlock.

But in spite of the problems, we had a great time. And we would have never spent two wonderful days camping in the redwoods at Humboldt State Park, or seen this amazing memorial to the town of Pepperwood, which was wiped out in the 1964 Eel River flood.

Memorial for town of Pepperwood

The caption says

To Pepperwood

And It’s Loved Ones

Gone but not forgotten

Presented by

Fortuna Chamber of Commerce

Inquiries to the Fortuna CoC for background and grammar checks have gone unanswered.

Yes, it costs more for Patagonia. But the way they treat me as a customer makes me happy to pay a premium…as my latest experience shows.

I had a pair of Patagonia gortex pants from way-back-when. Worked fine, though my duct tape patch job ruined the clean lines – I’d accidentally stuck my ice axe through the pants and into my left leg, instead of the glacier, during a glissade off Rainier.

And then this past snowboarding season some seam sealing tape started coming off, so things began to get a bit wet at times. I sent the pants to Patagonia, with a note explaining that I’d also be happy to pay for a real repair job of my ice axe mishap.

Yesterday I got a Patagonia gift card in the mail, for $238.44. No idea how they calculated that amount, but I’m looking forward to buying a replacement pair of pants. And they’ve reaffirmed my belief that paying for quality gear winds up being cheaper in the end.